The biggest problems we face as a society are systems problems. Systems thinking gives us not only the tools to zoom out and see these in their full, dynamic complexity, but to understand where we can most effectively intervene to make a difference.

But systems thinking can give us more than that. It can also give us powerful signals about whether our interventions will be ethical, and how we can overlay concepts like compassion, social license and fairness into the loops and the nodes. In the wake of two Royal Commissions and on wavefront of a third, Darren will discuss systems failures, their human cost, and how systems thinking can inoculate our designs from becoming, ultimately, harms.

The 2019 Australian Public Service (APS) Census results for a large operational government department reported that less than 23% of staff identified that “My agency recognises and supports that failure is a part of innovation.” Unsurprising then, only 32% of staff feel inspired to come up with new or better ways of working. With the final Thodey APS review imminent and interim results indicating a need for change where does this leave government departments and how can we, as agiligists, help?

Innovation must be a core priority for government departments, or they run the risk of becoming obsolete. All organisations alive today have needed to be agile to keep up with the changing world, yet government departments have been largely sheltered from these competitive forces due to the reliance of the public on departmental services and the consistency of funding from government budgets. However, this is no longer the case. The public is increasingly seeking innovation from its government. In 2018 Accenture research found that 8/10 citizens have the same or higher digital expectations from public sector organisations, meaning the public expects their governments to be as innovative as their mobile provider. There is growing public demand for government services to be at the cutting edge of technology and guided by smart insights to ensure public money is invested in the most transparent and meaningful way.

Underpinning successful innovation is agility and the philosophy it represents, including an egalitarian team structure and collaborating across teams. A growing body of research is showing that traditional forms of innovation in the private sector; entrepreneurship and competition, do not drive the same impact in the public sector. Public sector innovators are better off using a collaborative form of innovation. This means the public sector worker needs to develop collaboration skills as a priority. This is where Agile can step in.

This session will discuss results of the APS survey and interim APS Thodey Review and provide a discussion forum for participants focussed on agility and its impact on organisational innovation. It will be facilitated using principles of lean innovation and rapid prototyping. If you want to have a say and get your hands dirty than this is a session for you.

Hear from Product Designer Ryan Whitmore on how you can use the service design approach and gamification to discover unique solutions to your own business problem.

In late 2017 as part of efforts by Geoscience Austrlia's Cultural Reference Group chaired by the CEO, Cognitive Edge's sensemaker software was deployed to explore the cultural landscape of the organisation. The survey was extraordinary easy to get up and running and resulted in the anonymous collection of some 200 stories about "what it's like to work here" within a two month period. This talk introduces the methods we used in the survey, the results and actions that immediately followed it, as well as the base it has become to further map and improve our organisational culture.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum.Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

Does your organisation use terms “Agile”, User Story, MVP, Iteration Manager or ScrumMaster? Do you do a demonstration at the end of each iteration? If you organisation is like most in Australia, it’s likely that people in it are misunderstanding the primary purpose of these concepts. When the main point of such concepts are missed repeatedly, it can cripple the effectiveness of your Agile adoption. Don’t fear, the Doctor is in and there is a clear prescription for your ailment. Come and test your knowledge. Be prepared to be surprised.

What was the Hanoi Rat Massacre, and what can it tell us about Systems Thinking, and unintended consequences?

The Wholesome Show - science communication for the people who sit up the back of the class - is coming to LAST, and will use this story as a jumping off point to engage with systems thinking, and how it fits into the broader world around us.

Sustainable Pace is a core tenet of agile working. Team Health is a necessary ingredient in creative teamwork.

Come hear Brendan explain the principles and ideas here, and learn how to recognise when you need to take action and what you can do to improve things for your team.

A year ago in my free time, I started a remote study group for female junior developers, focusing on creating a game using Node.js, React, Redux and Electron. This year, three of the participants found jobs in the industry, and the project continues to grow.
How do you motivate junior developers to work in a non-profit study project? What are the main issues for them, and how to address those? How do you inspire people to learn, let them experiment and try new things, but at the same time deliver results and move the project forward? And to do all of this with an all-remote team?

WHY come along?
Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion in the practitioner community about what an Agile Coach Academy is and what it means for independent coaches.

In this presentation I will take the audience through the process from idea to establishment of Telstra's Agile Coach Academy. My role as the Academy Lead was to take 50 internal staff members of varying backgrounds and have them move through a developmental journey taking 20 weeks before they were deployed as beginner coaches.

Concurrently I was hiring senior experienced coaches to support and act as mentors; which was an critical part of the approach. I'll explain what we did, who was involved and how competency was progressively built throughout their journey.

You’ll hear from my heart not just my head
It was a transformational experience for all of us and I want to tell the community the story.

You’ll hear about my journey and the journey of the trainee coaches; what we all learned about agile coaching and ourselves from this experience together.

Come with your questions about agile coaching- I’ll have time to answer them

You are a Scrum Master, but you find yourself in between jobs. You begin your search. How do you choose the home that will be a great fit for you? How do you know which company you want to be adopted by? This talk is a fresh way to look at the companies that may be trying to hire for a role they don’t understand and don’t want to pay for.

Oh sure, there's plenty of speakers and sources spruiking how to build "psychological safety" in your organisation - but maybe you're looking to find your edge through wreaking havoc, setting your organisation against itself, and rising through the resulting chaos! MWA HA HA HA HA HA

This presentation will walk you through how to maximise damage at entry-level, how to set toxic examples as a senior, and how to project terror once you work your way into management. Along the way there will be references to a variety of sources and frameworks used for inspecting organisational alignment and the needs of teams and individuals; we shall be subverting these techniques to serve your nefarious plots!

In this advanced workshop we demonstrate a combination of experiential activity and theory in practice.

The session will help attendees identify how to accelerate Agile effectiveness through advanced interpersonal dynamics by observing that the key link between just doing Agile and successfully being agile is understanding how Agile works in a human systems perspective.

We will provide an introduction to concepts and behaviours that attendees can explore to improve the effectiveness of Agile practices and activities within their own unique situational context.

Attendees will take away a working knowledge of key practices and the practical skills to apply change with their teams immediately.

Perhaps you’ve heard about Wardley Mapping and are wondering what it is – or have tried it and want to know a
bit more. This session will provide an overview of Wardley Mapping, the basics of creating one and you will have
the opportunity to practice using it for decision-making.

The seminal industry podcast Agile Revolution is coming to LAST - not just to record vox pops, but to host a live show on stage! This will be a don't miss interactive session that the guys may even manage to publish in the same year that it's recorded! Come along to hear from the best in the business, as they discuss their thoughts and get your own thoughts recorded for posterity! Via La Revolution!

How can a Scrum Master/Agile coach/Leader ensures that the team feels safe and protected? Why building connections within the team is so important? Do we know what is the secret sauce for the magical recipe of high performing teams?

Let’s explore together two activities which can help in building connections within the team.

What would be the Rebellion’s or the Galactic Empire’s Vision Statement?

Join me in a lightning game of crafting multiple Vision Statement prototypes. You will experience an engaging, inclusive, interactive and innovative technique to craft a Vision Statement that you can immediately take away and apply in your own context.

Learn how to help your organisation, program, product, service or team become awesome.

I will present the winner and runner-up with an exciting Star Wars prize. This will be like the medal ceremony at the end of Star Wars: Episode 4 – A New Hope.

First: Encounter two conventional Vision Statement techniques. One involves a quadrant, for people who like quadrants.

Next: Try to remember the plot of the first Star Wars movie ever made. Become one with the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire.

The game: Experience a visioning technique based on Design Thinking. We will draw on the early Star Wars Universe so that we have a shared context. This is something I might have invented. The game, not Design Thinking or Star Wars.

The game is played in quick, successive rounds. We will then debrief and figure out what we learnt.

In today's world, if businesses aren’t more agile in the way they execute on their strategies, they risk over investing on initiatives that won’t result in the future growth they seek.

In this talk, we explore how and why businesses should think differently about what strategy means to them, followed by a discussion of some simple frameworks and models that can help organisations better check the performance of future growth strategies, and act earlier when it looks like those strategies are not going to turn up.

So, you’ve had some success with a few Agile teams applying Scrum by the book in a reasonably accepting situation. Or got teams to adopt Kanban or XP practices. How do you apply an IT software development approach in a non-IT software development context? The systems and rules of the game have changed and following the playbook is not going to be as useful as you might think.

Join Michael Huynh as he shares the evolution of a team through experimentation with different Agile and Lean practices to build a dynamic Agile team obsessed with continuous improvement, innovation, and customer value. He will be sharing this unique experience, taking a pragmatic approach through experimentation and how breaking the rules of ‘pure agile’ helped this team develop interesting patterns for success. A first in Government – Agile Video Production team.

This session will dive into leveraging different practices, highlighting the similarities in software development practices, revised mechanics and structure of this team. We will go through the transformational change of this team creating their own successful patterns, structure, and ways of working by breaking the rules. It might inspire your thoughts, processes to experiment and explore different practices to level up your Agility.

Reflecting back on my career, I have thought a lot about the managers I have had including the impacts they have had on their organisation, team, and myself personally. In this talk I will discuss typical management behaviours I have encountered, why not all managers are necessarily suited to agile leadership, however all managers can teach you something valuable about leadership.

Communication is a core skill. It is at the heart of all our interpersonal relationships with family, friends and work. It is something we instinctively learn from birth, and continue for the rest of out lives. Effective communication unlocks better relationships, and dramatically improves effectiveness, adaptability, innovation, competitiveness and profitability.

We are inherently bad at communication.

This talk explores the various ways in which we fail to communication effectively, including:

• Unconscious assumptions and cognitive biases
• Mismatches between individual and group goals (the Unilateral Control Model)
• Hiding information due preserve control or minimise losses

It's not all lost, though! There are a number of techniques and skills we can use to communicate more effectively, including the Mutual Learning Model and Non-Violent Communication (NVC).

At the end of this talk, you will understand the causes of ineffective communication, along with different models for better and more effective communication. The practice is up to you!

Self-organisation can be confronting to leadership. When you support a team to become self-organised it usually means giving up some control. In this workshop we will examine three core patterns and supporting practices that enable influence to be distributed. After this workshop you will have the tools to explicitly distribute influence with confidence.

This is a case study discussion to share how we are transforming the 2nd largest bank in Australia with a core enterprise team of 3 people and an extended coaching team of 8 professional coaches. We not only transitioned ways of working but also helped with organizational design, transitioned job titles (from over 150 to 7) and workflow management. We are using a model that helps teams change incrementally with weekly measures and understood results. We have been able to have remarkable success using a distributed coaching model, introducing new ways of learning and developing a learning organization.